Adventures in Cooking: Raspberry Buttermilk Cake

Well, I am not terrible at *making* these tasty tasty food experiments, but I sure am terrible about blogging them. It doesn’t help that I’ve already written this particular entry once, and was letting it “marinate” a bit before I went back to read through & revise one last time…. when my computer crashed, and NONE of it got saved. ._. Kids, ALWAYS SAVE YOUR WORK. You think I would have learned my lesson through 6 years of college. ALAS NO.

Moving on.

I made this particular gem what seems like EONS ago now, and I really want to make it again, with raspberries this time(!), before all the summer fruit goes away from the store. Yes, despite the fact that it is called a *Raspberry* Buttermilk Cake, I didn’t make it with raspberries, due to some Extremely Frustrating Circumstances (which, I might add, may seem funny now, but were severely disheartening to me at the time) that I will describe to you now.

I was planning on making this to bring with me to a dinner at a friend’s house, putting me under a Time Crunch — I really only had about an hour to run to the store after work & grab the fruit, then come home & make the dessert before I had to leave. So after work, I stop at the grocery store that’s directly on the way home. I make a quick loop of the produce section — no raspberries. There’s one more grocery store I can try that’s a bit further out of the way, so I go there…. and same deal. Quick loop of the produce section & NO RASPBERRIES. WOE. I have seriously been salivating over thinking about this cake with raspberries all day, and I am crushed to have my cake hopes dashed*. I have to take a moment right there in produce to pull myself together.

Deep breath. HOKAY. Plan B… B is for blackberries!

Let me assuage your fears, as I know y’all are in much suspense: the blackberry buttermilk cake was equally as tasty as I imagine a raspberry buttermilk cake would be. The recipe is, of course, courtesy of the fabulous Deb from Smitten Kitchen.

To prove my point, I submit to you this quote of mine from the Day of Baking:

Ok, y’all, the pictures don’t do the smell justice. Heaven is wafting through my apartment right now. If it tastes as half as good as it smells, this will be the best thing i’ve ever eaten.

And truly, this is the best summer cake ever. If you are like me and

are not a big fan of super-sugary icing getting in between you and your cake OR

like to have your heavier cakes as a sweetener to some sort of hot beverage like tea, most lovely in the winter-time

then you will completely agree with me. It is dangerously light and fluffy — and I say dangerously, because you can very easily eat 2 or 3 pieces without a second thought. Also, it has fruit in it! We are talking multiple chunks of the food pyramid here, people, what more can you ask out of a dessert!

The only snaffu I ran into — and it may not be a snaffu so much as an unexpected occurance — was that the cake rose so much it completely covered the blackberries. I overturned the pan onto a plate to achieve the tasty-looking photo featured up top, but I am sure this cake will be equally delicious in either attitude.

*You may think i’m dangerously close to hyperbole here, but let me explain to you my love affair with raspberries. I have a memory of summers in Wisconsin when I was younger, where my sister and I would go over to my great-grandparents’ and jump on their trampoline. In the backyard behind the trampoline, they had bushes and bushes of raspberries that we would pluck and pop straight into our mouths, gorging ourselves until we’d spoiled our dinners. Raspberries taste like those idyllic summer days.